Why so many democracies prefer Russia to Ukraine

Non-aligned democracies say they prefer to ‘talk to both sides’ but economic and political incentives make many lean to Moscow

By JOSE CABALLERO

APRIL 13, 2023

THE CONVERSATION

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting on the sidelines of the 11th BRICS Summit in Brasilia, Brazil, on November 13, 2019. India has been reluctant to condemn Russia outright for its invasion of Ukraine. Photo: Sputnik / Mikhail Metzel

After over a year of the Ukraine war, efforts at building a global consensus against Russia seem to have stalled, with many countries opting for neutrality.

The number of countries condemning Russia has declined, according to some sources. Botswana has edged towards Russia from its original pro-Ukraine stance, South Africa is moving from neutral to Russia-leaning and Colombia from condemning Russia to a neutral stance. At the same time, a large number of countries have been reluctant to support Ukraine.

In Africa, for example, despite the African Union’s call on Moscow for an “immediate ceasefire” most countries remain neutral. Some observers argue that this is the result of a tradition of left-leaning regimes that goes back to the cold war period. Others indicate that the current unwillingness of African countries originates in the history of Western intervention, sometimes covert and others overt, in their internal affairs.

The reluctance to condemn Russia, however, goes beyond Africa. In February 2023, most Latin American countries supported a UN resolution to call for an immediate and unconditional Russian withdrawal. And yet, despite Brazil’s support for several UN resolutions in Ukraine’s favor, it has not condemned Russia outright.

Within the UN, the stance of Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador and Venezuela has allowed Russia to evade Western sanctions. Furthermore, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, rejected calls to send military material to Ukraine, and Mexico questioned Germany’s decision to provide tanks to Ukraine.

The same divisions are evident in Asia. While Japan and South Korea have openly denounced Russia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has not collectively done so. China approaches the conflict through a balancing act through its strategic partnership with Russia and its increasing influence in the UN. During its time as a member of the UN Security Council, India abstained on votes related to the conflict.

The politics of neutrality

Such a cautious and neutral position has been influenced by the Cold War’s non-alignment movement which was perceived as a way for developing countries to fight the conflict “on their terms” and thus acquire a degree of foreign policy autonomy, outside the Soviet Union and the west’s sphere of influence.

Studies of EU sanctions have argued that an unwillingness of other countries to back the EU position can relate to both a desire for foreign policy independence and an unwillingness to antagonize a neighbor.

Non-alignment allows countries to avoid becoming entangled in the rising geopolitical tensions between the West and Russia. It is perhaps for this reason that many democratic countries maintain a stance of neutrality, preferring, as South African president Cyril Ramaphosa put it, to “talk to both sides.”

There are, however, particular economic and political incentives that are influential when countries decide against condemning Russia.

Brazil

Since the earlier stages of the Ukraine conflict, Brazil has maintained a pragmatic but ambivalent stance. This position connects to Brazil’s agricultural and energy needs. As one of the world’s top agricultural producers and exporter, Brazil requires a high rate of fertilizer usage. In 2021, the value of imports from Russia was of US$5.58 billion of which 64% was from fertilizers. Imports of fertilizers from Russia are 23% of the total 40 million tonnes imported.

OEC: https://oec.world/en/ ; Author provided (no reuse)

In February 2023, it was announced that the Russian gas company Gazprom will invest in Brazil’s energy sector as part of the expanding energy relations between the two countries. This could lead to close collaboration in oil and gas production and processing, and in the development of nuclear power.

Such collaboration can benefit Brazil’s oil sector, expected to be among the world’s top exporters. By March 2023, Russian exports of diesel to Brazil reached new records, at the same time as a total EU embargo on Russian oil products. Higher level of diesel supplies may alleviate any potential shortages that can affect Brazil’s agricultural sector.
India

Observers point out that in the post-cold-war era, Russia and India continue to share similar strategic and political views. In the early 2000s, in the context of their strategic partnership, Russia’s purpose was to build a multipolar global system which appealed to India’s wariness of the United States as a partner.

Russia has also provided India with support for its nuclear weapons program and its efforts to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Russia continues to be a key player in India’s arms trade, supplying 65% of India’s weapons imports between 1992 and 2021. Since the start of the war it has become an important supplier of oil at discount prices. This has meant an increase in purchases from about 50,000 barrels per day in 2021 to about 1 million barrels per day by June 2022.

South Africa

On the eve of the war’s anniversary, South Africa held a joint naval drill with Russia and China. For South Africa, the benefits from the exercise relate to security through capacity building for its underfunded and overstretched navy. More broadly, there are trade incentives for South Africa’s neutral stance.

Russia is the largest exporter of arms to the African continent. It also supplies nuclear power and, importantly, 30% of the continent’s grain supplies such as wheat, with 70% of Russia’s overall exports to the continent concentrated in four countries including South Africa.

In January 2023, Russia was one of the largest providers of nitrogenous fertilizers to South Africa, a critical element for pasture and crop growth. In addition, among the main imports from Russia are coal briquettes used for fuel in several industries including food processing. Considering the level of food insecurity in the country both imports are fundamental for its socio-political and economic stability.

The Ukraine war has shown that non-alignment continues to be a popular choice, despite appeals to support another democracy in trouble. This policy has long been an important element of the political identity of countries such as India. In other cases, such as Brazil, despite apparent shifts under President Jair Bolsonaro, non-interventionism remains a fundamental element of its policy tradition.

Nevertheless, neutrality is likely to become a “tricky balancing act” as conflicting interests become more acute, particularly in the context of the West’s provision of direct investment plus development and humanitarian aid to many of the non-aligned states.


Jose Caballero, Senior Economist, IMD World Competitiveness Center, International Institute for Management Development (IMD)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

First Asian screenwriter challenged Hollywood racism

In the 1920s ‘dream factory,’ Winnifred Eaton also was the first woman to head a script department

By MARY CHAPMAN AND SYDNEY LINES

APRIL 15, 2023
THE CONVERSATION

Winnifred Eaton. Photo: Wikipedia


A century before Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress, Winnifred Eaton,the daughter of a Chinese mother and a white English father, was working behind the scenes in Hollywood.

Winnifred Eaton, often credited in Hollywood as Winifred Reeve, was born in Montréal in 1875. She wrote and adapted scores of screenplays for MGM and Universal Studios, where she was literary advisor and editor-in-chief from 1925 to 1930.

Eaton was the first Asian screenwriter in Hollywood, and the first Asian — and first woman — to head a Hollywood script department.

Together with a team of scholars, including Joey Takeda and Jean Lee Cole, we are digitizing Eaton’s surviving screenplays so that her role in Hollywood, and the tradition of Asians in Hollywood, from Eaton to Yeoh, can be better understood.

Eaton was an advocate for more sympathetic depictions of women, the working classes and some racialized people, but also complicit in her era’s racism and sexism. That her efforts to hold space for Asian characters and themes were ultimately rejected by Hollywood speaks volumes about its refusal to accept Asians in its Golden Age.

Early career

Eaton’s mother, Achuen Amoy, was born in China, and, as our research has uncovered, toured the world as a child apprentice to a Chinese acrobatic troupe. After returning to China, she met and married English silk importer Edward Eaton. The Eatons lived in England and New York before settling in Montréal.

Eaton’s novel ‘A Japanese Nightingale’ (1901), an immediate bestseller, was made into a film. Photo: Wikipedia

Soon after Canada introduced the Chinese Head Tax in 1885, Eaton’s sister Edith Eaton began to publish sympathetic fictional and journalistic portraits of North American Chinatowns under the pen name “Sui Sin Far.”

Winnifred Eaton, however, began her career as an author at the height of the western popularization of Japanese art and design in a context of orientalism and racism. She published bestselling novels under the faux-Japanese pen-name “Onoto Watanna,” a problematic persona she assumed in 1896 and later came to regret.

Eaton’s second novel A Japanese Nightingale (1901) was an immediate bestseller, translated into several languages, and made into a film in 1918.
Screenwriting success

Yet Eaton was much more than the author of formulaic Japanese romances. Like many early 20th-century novelists and playwrights, Eaton recognized that the movie industry desperately needed writers with an ear for dialogue as it moved from its silent era into the “talkies.”

It also needed writers with perspectives on what were seen as exotic locales, the sites of cultural collision and exchange that were at the heart of the early “dream factory.”

As performing arts scholar Vito Adriaensens has uncovered, Eaton optioned her first story to the Selig Polyscope Company in 1914.

Later that decade, Eaton won a screenwriting contest. Writing as Winifred Reeve, she earned her first screenwriting credit for the 1921 Universal feature False Kisses. By the early 1920s, Eaton had moved with her second husband to Alberta, where she continued to write.

Credited on only five films

During this period, Eaton wrote scores of scripts, including several for starlets Mary Philbin and Mary Nolan.

Universal Studios referred to Eaton as “an instrument of salvage” who could go into its “morgues” and “garb” abandoned scripts in “modern screen attire.”

However, in the collaborative world of Hollywood, where much writing labor remains invisible, Eaton received screenwriting credit for only five films.

Many of the films we know she worked on, for example Shanghai Lady, East is West, Barbary Coast and Borneo, featured Asian characters, but these were played by white actors in yellowface.

Censored scripts

Eaton’s depictions of race and gender often aligned with the outdated standards of the time. That said, as literature scholar Jean Lee Cole has argued, multiple drafts of screenplays reveal Eaton’s efforts to create sympathetic racialized characters, particularly women, and to depict interracial relationships.

However, these efforts were often rejected or written out by later screenwriters and editors, or censored by 1930s production codes.

Cole compared scripts in Eaton’s papers with their final filmed versions and noted how other writers and producers revised Eaton’s scripts to conform to existing “film formulas that reified male dominance, class hierarchies and racial purity.”

Upon seeing the revised script for Barbary Coast, Eaton wrote “I really feel sick …. I feel as if I don’t want my name on this.”

Brilliant novel ‘Cattle’ critiqued colonialism

Eaton’s film treatment for her brilliant 1923 novel Cattle made a daring critique of the violence, racism and sexism undergirding settler colonialism.

In Eaton’s story, a rancher steals cattle from local Indigenous communities and unleashes violence on his illegitimate son by a Stoney Nakoda woman. The rancher rapes his housemaid. A Chinese cook achieves justice by loosening the gates so the abusive boss’s starving cattle can run free, and one of them gores the rancher to death.

However, in a revision of Eaton’s treatment, another writer eliminated the cook’s role. Paramount then scuttled the project because of the story’s sympathetic portrayal of a mother raising her illegitimate child. A film of Cattle was never made.

Hollywood ambivalence

Hollywood cast Anna May Wong as Indigenous characters. (Wikipedia)

As Everything Everywhere All at Once actor James Hong recalled, early Hollywood was not a welcoming place for Asian actors and writers, despite its fascination with Asian settings and topics. If Asian actors were given roles, these were often as villains or in other stereotyped racialized roles.

Chinese American actress Anna May Wong (1905-1961) played Indigenous characters in The Alaskan (1924) and Peter Pan (1924).

Sessue Hayakawa was a silent film star and in 1957 was nominated for an Oscar. (Wikipedia)

Sessue Hayakawa (1886-1973), the first big-screen heartthrob or sex symbol and first Japanese actor nominated for an Oscar, told Eaton in an 1929 interview that he “did not like the stories” he was required to play. He also told Eaton that he had left Hollywood in 1922 in protest because he had been referred to with a racial slur.

The Hays Code, introduced in 1930, made things worse for actors of Asian backgrounds when it forbade featuring non-white actors in romantic on-screen relationships with white actors.

New edition of ‘Cattle’

Eaton left Hollywood in 1931. While she continued to write screenplays, there is no evidence that any of her later scripts got produced.

This July, scholars will gather in Calgary, Alberta, with Eaton’s descendants including biographer Diana Birchall for a conference open to the public to discuss Eaton’s career and to launch a new edition of Cattle on the centenary of its publication.

Mary Chapman is a professor of English and the academic director of the Public Humanities Hub at the University of British Columbia. Sydney Lines is a public scholar and PhD candidate in English language and literatures at the University of British Columbia.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

US guns for more accurate, lethal and survivable nukes (NO SUCH THING)

US plans next generation reentry vehicle for its land-based nuclear arsenal to deter China and Russia’s new collective threat

By GABRIEL HONRADA

AsiaTimes

APRIL 13, 2023

An LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBM in its silo. Photo: Twitter / Screengrab

The US has unveiled plans for a new reentry vehicle to be mounted on the next generation of the land-based leg of its nuclear triad. The announcement comes amid increased tensions with China and Russia, two of the world’s other leading nuclear powers, at what some see as the outbreak of a New Cold War.

This month, Breaking Defense reported that the US Air Force had started soliciting plans for the Next Generation Reentry Vehicle (NGRV) to be mounted on its new LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), with design objectives requiring increased survivability, lethality and accuracy.

The report states that a reentry vehicle houses a nuclear missile’s warhead. The US Air Force plans to put one warhead on each LGM-35A Sentinel missile in its inventory but could put two or three warheads on each in response to changes in the international security environment.

Breaking Defense notes that the NGRV will be modularly developed using open system architecture and digital engineering to incorporate future warhead designs and countermeasures.

The project follows US efforts to replace its long-serving land-based ICBM. Last April, Asia Times reported on US plans to replace the Cold War-era LGM-30G Minuteman III with the LGM-35A Sentinel. The US aims to complete this modernization effort by 2029, with the latter missile being in service until the 2070s.

In contrast to the LGM-30G Minuteman III, the LGM-35A Sentinel features a modular design and open software architecture, allowing for easy replacement of obsolete components and multiple contractors to compete for system upgrades and improvements such as safety measures, guidance systems and penetration aids.

The LGM-35A Sentinel also allows warhead maintenance with closed silo doors, eliminating a security vulnerability and reducing security detail manpower requirements compared to the LGM-30G Minuteman III.

The LGM-35A Sentinel has improved throw weight compared to the LGM-30G Minuteman III, allowing the former to carry heavier payloads including up to three warheads or increased penetration aids

.

An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launches during an operational test at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. 

Photo: US Air Force / Senior Airman Ian Dudley

That ICBM upgrade project underscores the enduring importance of the US land-based nuclear arsenal. Given that, Todd Harrison, in a 2017 Center for Strategic and International Studies report, notes that ground-launched ICBMs serve two main roles in the US nuclear triad.

First, Harrison mentions that ground-launched ICBMs act as a “missile sponge” to draw incoming enemy missiles, saying that an adversary must spend at least one missile to neutralize geographically-dispersed targets in a pre-emptive strike, increasing the missile numbers and scale needed for such an attack to be successful.

Second, Harrison says that land-based ICBMs provide a first-strike capability because, unlike nuclear weapons on aircraft and submarines, nearly all are always on alert and can launch within minutes.

But despite the strategic importance of the US land-based nuclear arsenal, it is in dire need of modernization. In a September 2022 article for Time, W J Hennigan reported that the US land-based nuclear arsenal built around the LGM-30G Minuteman III still uses vintage components from the 1960s, struggles with obsolete command and control equipment, is housed in dilapidated infrastructure and faces increasingly difficult and expensive maintenance.

Despite these challenges, Hennigan mentions that a land-based nuclear arsenal is critical for the US to maintain strategic deterrence against China, North Korea and Russia.

Although he says critics point out that US air and sea-based nuclear weapons are more than enough to deter potential adversaries, land-based nuclear missile silos are tempting targets for an enemy nuclear attack as an accident in one of those facilities can result in a nuclear catastrophe.

Still, the enduring need for the US to maintain its strategic deterrent posture against evolving nuclear threats from near-peer adversaries and to reassure its allies has prompted US nuclear arsenal modernization efforts.

A Sino-Russian nuclear concert could tip the global balance of nuclear weapons away from the US. Last month, Asia Times reported on Russia’s plans to provide fast breeder reactor technology to China, which could allow it to produce more plutonium for its nuclear arsenal expansion.

Russia’s nuclear energy exports, which have surged since its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, have given it a lifeline to compensate for lost energy and weapons sales revenues.

It also shows that Russia has set aside long-term concerns about China’s long-term threat in its Far East and signifies Russia’s increased desire for cooperation with China.

The possible upsizing of China’s nuclear arsenal from 400 warheads today to 700, coupled with more diverse delivery systems such as stealth bombers, road-and-rail mobile launchers and ballistic missile submarines, gives China a credible second-strike capability, options for limited theater-level nuclear strikes and the means to brandish nuclear weapons coercively.

Given that, the US, for the first time in its history, is squaring off against two nuclear-armed near-peer adversaries, making it imperative to modernize its nuclear arsenal.

An intercontinental ballistic missile at a military parade in Moscow, May 9, 2017.

 Photo: TASS / Valery Sharifulin

A 2023 study by the Center for Global Security Research mentions that China and Russia are bound by hostility to US-led global and regional orders and are resolved to bring about their end, with both having large nuclear arsenals and new ideas for using them to break US alliances and sap US political will to defend its interests.

The report also mentions that China and Russia’s use of nuclear brinksmanship and blackmail threatens the US and its allies. US allies’ dependence on nuclear weapons for strategic deterrence has increased steadily over the last two decades, making it imperative that US nuclear security guarantees remain credible.

It also mentions a potential Sino-Russian nuclear concert, underscoring concerns that the US may not be able to deter China and Russia at the same time, noting that while the US may be preoccupied with one near-peer nuclear adversary, the other may choose to act in a limited manner against US interests, exploiting America’s distraction and playing up the threat of using nuclear weapons as strategic cover for its actions.

A PLAGUE UPON BOTH YOUR HOUSES

Don’t let US-Chinese rivalry haunt tracing of Covid-19 origin

The search for the truth has become a blame game driven not by science but by superpower rivalry

By SUN XI

APRIL 14, 2023

An aerial view shows a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in central China's Hubei province. Photo: AFP

Although the global Covid-19 pandemic has not completely ended, the post-Covid era is coming. Life in Singapore where I reside has long gone back to normal, and I have traveled back to China twice this year for business trips. There is hardly any trace of the pandemic, and people are just working and living as usual to enjoy their lives without talking about Covid-19 any more.

However, some people seem still to be obsessed with Covid-19. Most notably, the US Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed the “Covid-19 Origin Act of 2023” last month to “get to the bottom of Covid-19’s origins to help ensure we can better prevent future pandemics.”

But why did the United States not pass an “HIV/AIDS Origin Act” or “Swine Flu/H1N1 Origin Act” in the past? Obviously, because the human immunodeficiency virus did not originate in China, and H1N1 virus was first detected in the US.

President Biden stated that under the Act, his administration will review all classified information relating to Covid-19’s origins, including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The main advocate of the Act, US Senator Josh Hawley, put it more bluntly: “The American [people] deserve to know the truth behind the origins of the pandemic and we must begin the process of holding China accountable.”

So the real goal of the Act is very clear: to prove the SARS-CoV-2 virus was leaked from the Wuhan lab and to blame China. Isn’t that against the “presumption of innocence,” a principle long held by the US itself?

Previously, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo firmly claimed that he had “a large amount of evidence” of the leak but eventually was unable to show anything concrete. Even today, US intelligence agencies are still divided over whether virus came from a lab leak or an animal.

If the US government really wants to know the origin of Covid-19, it should not ignore the appeal that its Fort Detrick lab in Frederick, Maryland, and 336 biological laboratories overseas should also be investigated by an independent third party led by the World Health Organization. Doing otherwise shows double standards applied on China and the US itself.

In his recent article “Navigating the new age of great-power competition,” veteran former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan sharply pointed out that “the US-Chinese rivalry seems set to become the defining feature of international relations in the 21st century.”

He is right. Tracing the origin of Covid-19 should be a matter of science, but unfortunately it has become a blame game haunted by superpower rivalry. It seems that the US does not really care whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus was from China, but it just wants to use the issue to attack China further.

If so, the world may never be able to know the truth about the virus’ origin. If we still want to know the facts, we need to put geopolitics aside and leave the matter to scientists.

Sun Xi, a China-born alumnus of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, is an independent commentary writer based in Singapore. He is also founder and CEO of ESGuru, a Singapore-based consultancy firm specializing in environmental, social and governance issues.

The Cobalt Gold Rush and the East Palestine Disaster

BY ELLEN BROWN

 APRIL 14, 2023
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Holidays in my childhood were spent at my grandparents’ farm in Plain Grove, Pennsylvania, 35 miles from East Palestine, Ohio. My grandfather’s grandfather fought at Gettysburg and homesteaded the 160-acre farm after the Civil War. My grandmother sold it in the 1960s for $13,000, lacking a male heir to do the work; but my relatives still live in the area.

I have therefore taken a keen interest in the toxic chemical disaster that resulted when a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed  in East Palestine on Feb. 3, although it is not my usual line of research. The official narrative doesn’t seem to add up. Something else must have been going on, but what?

A Litany of Anomalies

The 150-car train was 1.76 miles long, and 10 of the 38 derailed cars contained hazardous materials, including vinyl chloride. The decision was made to create a hole in each of the suspect cars and allow the contents to flow into a pit, which was then lit on fire. As reported in Newsweek:

The toxic mixture of chemicals and carcinogens released … could spread many miles out from the crash site, experts say.

The chemicals—including vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate and ethylene glycol monobutyl, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)— were being carried aboard the train when it derailed. …

The fire sent up a large plume of black smoke.  When burned, vinyl chloride reacts to form phosgene gas, which was used as a chemical weapon in World War I.

How far could the phosgene cloud spread? According to a researcher cited in the Newsweek article, “It depends very much on the weather conditions … but potentially well over 100 miles radius.” Vinyl chloride becomes phosgene gas, a chemical weapon, only when burned. Why was the decision made to dump and burn the chemicals? Independent journalist Eric Coppolino writes that the “decision to breach, dump and burn was totally irrational and nobody understands it. The more experience people have, the less they understand it. EPA was involved; it cannot merely be a bystander.” Observing that there are gaping holes in the official narrative, he writes [brackets mine]:

There has never been a dump and burn in railroad history, even in the decade prior to its being banned by 1980 regulations. There is always dump and remove, or decant (into tankers) and remove. Spills happen every two weeks — the burn part is unprecedented and there is rarely a need to dump. The typical approach is to take the contaminated dirt to a hazardous waste landfill.

A 2022 EPA guidance, which says how to interpret laws and regs, repeats the ban on dump and burn except only after careful consideration when there is absolutely no other alternative (which has never happened in civilian society; it happens in the military). [For more on the EPA guidance, see here.]

Fully enclosed hazmat tanker truck driver recovery operation (entirely routine procedure when there are damaged tanker cars) was initiated the night of Friday Feb. 3 — and then called off within 24 hours (on Friday night or Saturday). Who called it off and why?

Fire lines pulled from keeping tankers cool.

No samples of soot or wipe samples from inside the tanker cars — missing crucial data that would reveal the true nature of the incident.

Point source soot samples are also missing. These would also be tell-all. …

No state or federal emergencies were declared, depriving governments of emergency powers and agencies of certain kinds of authority …

Analysis of samples from PTRMS lab (a high-end mobile chemistry analysis lab) are bogged [logged? bogged down?] at Carnegie Mellon, in custody of [research professor] Albert Presto, who is not releasing them.

Pressure release valves (PRVs) were working fine, per NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] report; the tanker cars were not in jeopardy. Other reports say the VCM [vinyl chloride monomer] was not in jeopardy of exploding and besides, they can easily decanter it into tanker trucks as is done regularly.

Five dead CTEH guys [environmental scientists] in airplane crash (eyewitnesses to point source sampling), who were at the East Palestine scene taking samples on behalf of the railroad and took samples … they died en route to the next mission. [CTEH was the company hired by Norfolk Southern to test the air in East Palestine, though the plane crash was en route to a later Ohio mission.]

People are still sick in Palestine in a way they should not be based on every other incident my source has worked on for 30 years. …

Chemicals that are currently banned from production by federal law are DDT, PCBs, PBDEs, some CFCs, all chemical warfare agents and chemicals banned from production by voluntary agreement with chemical industry are PFOS and PFOA.

OK, what really happened? —Eric Coppolino, reposted on The Truth Barrier.

Cobalt, Lithium and Appalachian Coal Mines

Another astute researcher, who has a podcast at SquirrelTribe.com, has been asking similar questions. She traces possible links to the cobalt gold rush, having found a research paper from Pennsylvania State University targeting western Pennsylvania and the adjacent Ohio border area for cobalt extraction. It seems that old abandoned coal mines are potential sources of cobalt and lithium. (My uncle was a coal miner in western Pennsylvania.)

As observed in the New York Times, “The quest for cobalt, which is essential for electric-car batteries, has fueled a cycle of exploitation, greed and gamesmanship.” And as noted on Energy.gov in April 2021, “Cobalt is considered the highest material supply chain risk for electric vehicles (EVs) in the short and medium-term.”

According to Energy.gov on April 4, 2023, “Across the country, there are billions of tons of coal waste and ash, mine tailings, acid mine drainage, and discharged water. These waste streams from mining, energy production, and related activities contain a wide variety of valuable rare earth elements and other critical minerals that can be produced and used to build clean energy technologies ….”

The SquirrelTribe podcaster points to an April 4, 2023, Associated Press article which states:

President Joe Biden’s administration is making $450 million available for solar farms and other clean energy projects at the site of current or former coal mines, part of his efforts to combat climate change.

As many as five projects nationwide will be funded through the 2021 infrastructure law …

The White House also said it will allow developers of clean energy projects to take advantage of billions of dollars in new bonuses being offered in addition to investment and production tax credits available through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. …

Mining areas in Appalachia and other parts of the country have long had the infrastructure, workforce, expertise and “can-​do attitude” to produce energy, [Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm] told reporters on Monday. …Rare earth elements and other minerals are key parts of batteries for electric vehicles, cellphones and other technology. Biden has made boosting domestic mining a priority as the U.S. seeks to decrease its reliance on China, which has long dominated the battery supply chain.

In November 2021, Scientific American published an article titled “Chip Shortage Threatens Biden’s Electric Vehicle Plans,” quoting Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who said, “The average electric vehicle has about 2000 chips, roughly double the average number of chips in a non-electric car.” She told reporters that Biden’s plans for half of new vehicles to be electric by 2030 depends on the U.S. investing in semiconductor production – the “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.”

On Jan. 21, 2022, a White House Fact Sheet said that computer chips were critical to a range of products from cars to smart phones; that the Administration had been working around the clock to expand U.S. chip manufacturing capacity; and that “Today, Intel will announce a new $20 billion factory outside Columbus, Ohio.”

The Intel chip factory has been called the largest private sector investment in Ohio history, expected to become the “largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet.” But finding the needed minerals could be a problem. As detailed by Andrew Hawkins in an August 2022 article on The Verge:

EVs need batteries, and batteries need minerals like nickel, cobalt, and lithium. The US has some of these minerals underground, and it wants to dig them up, expeditiously, so that it doesn’t have to rely as much on other countries, including China.

But this is where it gets tricky. Mining operators say they can speed up the digging process, but a bunch of regulatory roadblocks stand in their way. And environmentalists and tribal groups remain extremely skeptical that all this mining can be done in a way that doesn’t ruin the land and spoil the water. …

The Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ new tax and climate bill, devotes nearly $400 billion to clean energy initiatives over the next decade, including EV tax credits and financing for companies that manufacture clean cars in the U.S. And California said it would ban the sale of new gas-​powered vehicles starting in 2035, a move that over a dozen other states are expected to follow.

But the only EVs that will be eligible for the $7,500 credit are ones that are made in North America using batteries with minerals dug out of the ground in the U.S. or from its trading partners….

It may just not be possible. A US Geological Survey estimated that to fully electrify its vehicle fleet, the U.S. will need 1.27 million and 160,000 metric tons of battery-​grade nickel and cobalt per year, respectively — both of which exceed total global production in 2021.

Sitting on a Rare Earth Goldmine – Blessing or Curse?

As observed on NPR.org, “Smartphones, computers and electric vehicles may be emblems of the modern world, but … their rechargeable batteries are frequently powered by cobalt mined by workers laboring in slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Those are not conditions under which American miners would want to work, and the Congolese shouldn’t  have to either. But it could be good news for the people of the East Palestine region: They may be sitting on something that is more valuable to the electric vehicle industry even than gold — cobalt and lithium.

However, suspicions also run the other way: that their lands have been rendered uninhabitable in order to devalue the property, allowing it to be acquired cheaply for cobalt recovery, either in voluntary sale or by eminent domain.

Eminent domain is an extraordinary power by which the government can take property without the owner’s consent. Generally, the only prerequisites are that the property be put to a public use and that fair compensation be paid. But the power is controversial and subject to abuse. In Iowa, it is being used over landowners’ objections to force access for carbon capture pipelines, intended to lower ethanol’s carbon emissions by transporting liquefied carbon dioxide from ethanol plants to be stored underground. Summit Carbon Solutions plans a $4.5 billion 2000-mile pipeline transporting carbon dioxide through five states.

Intentionally rendering properties uninhabitable sounds pretty far-fetched, but it is not without precedent. In a podcast titled “Blackstone STEALING Homes From Working Class Americans,” Krystal Ball states:

Danish lawmakers passed a law that would prevent landlords from jacking up prices until five years after the completion of any new renovations. This was in response to allegations from residents that Blackstone would intentionally embark upon loud and intrusive renovations with the direct goal of trying to force longtime residents out so that they could then dramatically up their rents. In Copenhagen this approach came to be known as “shake the building.” As one journalist wrote, “Imagine an apple tree shaking at the trunk to get the apples loose from the branches. In the real estate world the occupants are the apples, the apartments are the branches, and when a landlord ‘shakes the building,’ it is to get the tenants out.”

Two of the three largest institutional investors in Blackstone are Vanguard and BlackRock, which largely own each other. Vanguard and BlackRock are also the two largest shareholders of Intel Corp. And the SquirrelTribe podcaster notes that they are two of the three largest investors not only in Southern Norfork but in Netflix, which released a movie called “White Noise” in November 2022. The movie tracks the incidents in East Palestine so closely that some bloggers suggest it was “predictive programming” for that disaster. The plot includes a tanker truck carrying toxic materials that crashes into a train in a small Ohio town, creating an airborne toxic event. The film was shot almost entirely in Northeast Ohio, where several East Palestine residents worked as extras in it. One of them told CNN that the film “hits too close to home.” He said, “The first half of the movie is all almost exactly what’s going on here. Everybody’s been talking about that.”

Another suspicious development is an East Palestine ordinance passed in January that requires the owners of vacant buildings to pay a substantial fee, file a vacant building plan, and obtain an inspection for vacant buildings. Exemptions apply if they plan to sell the property.

Abandon the Ban?

Whether or not the push for U.S. cobalt and lithium mining had anything to do with the East Palestine disaster, maybe it is time to rethink the drive to force 100% of new car sales to be electric vehicles. Europe is now “all but abandoning” its engine ban. According to the Wall Street Journal on March 27:

The implausibility of a net-​zero carbon energy future is becoming so obvious that even Europeans are starting to notice. Witness the weekend decision to step back from the ban on internal-​combustion automobile engines that the European Union had intended to implement by 2035.

… Battery technologies don’t exist to replace fossil fuels in driving distance or ease of refueling, and no one can say if or when such batteries will materialize. …

Electric vehicles also require rare-​earth minerals often sourced from dirty mines in China. They’re only as green and affordable as the electricity used to charge them. In Europe that means coal-​fired power for which consumers pay a huge price owing to the costs of forcing intermittent renewables such as wind and solar into the grid.

For these reasons plus a strong dose of old-​fashioned commercial self-​interest, Germany’s auto industry objected to the ban on internal-​combustion engines, and it’s good someone did. Resistance from Berlin and several other European governments has forced Brussels into all but abandoning its engine ban.

As the chairman of one Indigenous tribe wrote in a comment to the U.S. Department of the Interior, “The green energy revolution cannot be built on a dirty mining industry, outdated regulations, and environmental injustice.”

This article was first posted on ScheerPost.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 300+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.

Annals of the Covert World: the Secret Life of

Shampoo

Jeffrey St. Clair 

APRIL 14, 2023

Lobby of CIA HQ. Photo: CIA.

It’s been 30 years now since I wrote my first story about the CIA. In the decades that followed, the Agency has been a featured player in at least four books (Whiteout, Imperial Crusades, Grand Theft Pentagon and End Times) and hundreds of articles. My office has nearly been overtaken by the inexorable accretion of boxes filled with heavily redacted files extracted from the Agency’s vaults via FOIA. The files for our book Whiteout totaled more than 150,000 pages alone. The papers from the George W. Bush and Obama forever wars, mass surveillance, renditions and torture schemes amassed another 100,000 pages, at least. At a certain point you just stop counting. This week I was rearranging the Teton-like piles of boxes to reduce the risk of being crushed at my desk when the Big One hits the Willamette Valley and a file spilled open, scattering my notes on the following story, which I was working on the week before the planes took down the Twin Towers and immolated the Pentagon. It seems an epoch ago now and I’d nearly forgotten it. But I chuckled as I read the pages about how a veteran of the Agency’s infamous Phoenix Program had landed a job doing dirty tricks in a shampoo caper. The surveillance state is both more sinister and much sillier than most of us imagine. There are many such stories in these files, some of them outtakes from Whiteout, which deserve to be resurrected from the crypt to remind us of the kinds of obscenities and absurdities the CIA has been up to all these years. The running title for this occasional series, Annals of the Covert World, is a tribute to John McPhee’s books on geology, Annals of the Former World. We’ve both done years of excavating through deep strata of information about how the past continues to shape and often warp the present. –JSC

Veterans of the CIA’s Phoenix Program always seem to make soft landings with a golden parachute: a lifetime guarantee of gainful employment. CounterPunch reported on the ascent into the Congress of Robert Simmons, a Phoenix veteran and adept at torture. Then there’s the case of former senator Bob Kerrey, who commanded a Phoenix operation in the Mekong delta that featured throat-slitting and the assassination of elderly men and women and children. Now comes word that Phoenix veterans are also highly sought after by the upper echelons of the corporate world.

In early September, Procter and Gamble, the Cincinnati-based conglomerate, fessed up to hiring Phoenix operatives to infiltrate its chief rival Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch cosmetics giants. It was all about the secrets of shampoo, specifically the top-selling Salon Selectives and Finesse. It seems both of those Unilever brands had taken a big bite out of the market share once dominated by a shelf of P&G products, including Wash & Go, Head & Shoulders, Pantene and Vidal Sassoon. Also at stake was the planned sale of Clairol, which was on the auction block with both companies in an intense bidding struggle. One former P&G executive said that the companies were engaged in a decades-long dirty war, which had become “a death struggle to incrementally gain share”.

The operation was launched in June of 2000, when P&G contracted with the Phoenix Consulting Group of Huntsville, Alabama, a corporate espionage firm set up by Phoenix veteran John Nolan and fellow CIA officers. P&G also set up a secret wing inside its own security department. The operations were run out of a secret office known as The Ranch, and featured safe houses, off-shore bank accounts, dumpster diving and informants.

Nolan and his operatives were apparently able to secure more than 80 internal Unilever documents that detailed the company’s shampoo marketing strategy for the next two years. The documents were returned to the company after word of the operation leaked out to a reporter at Fortune magazine. P&G apologized for the operation, saying it had “violated our strict business guidelines regarding our business policies.” The company also fired two executives in the firm’s security sector.

But few take these actions as anything more than the defensive maneuvers of a company caught doing something shady and in full damage control mode. Indeed, P&G is well-known for its paranoia and obsessive concerns about corporate secrecy. Its security officers are known inside the company as “Proctoids”. In the past, P&G has shadowed employees on their business trips to see if they chatted to fellow travelers (and Unilever agents?) about company business, snooped in on company phone lines and tracked computer traffic. A few years ago P&G executives became enraged by a series of critical articles about the company by Wall Street Journal reporter Alecia Swasy and retaliated by hitting her with grand jury subpoenas and putting her under 24-hour surveillance.

P&G CEO, John Pepper, can hardly claim ignorance of the operation. Over the past year, Pepper has been bragging publicly about the success of his company’s ventures into “competitive intelligence,” most recently in a June speech in Montreal. The speech was given two months after Pepper sent his apologies to Unilever for filching the company’s marketing plans.

The leading guru of competitive intelligence is none other than Pepper’s pal John Nolan, the Phoenix vet who credits himself with perfecting, if not inventing the field. Indeed, there’s even a school for corporate snoops set up by Nolan and other CIA/Phoenix retirees called the Centre for Operational Business Intelligence, a kind of School of the Americas for corporate snooping and assorted dirty tricks.

Douglas Valentine, author of The Phoenix Program, describes Nolan as “disarmingly forthright”. There’s no question that Nolan doesn’t shy away from his bloody resumé. In fact, it’s his calling card. CounterPunch has acquired a briefing paper Nolan prepared for prospective clients, in which the former spook details his methods for “competitive intelligence gathering”, “elicitation techniques”, and “countermeasures”.

“As business turns” Nolan writes, “we’ve been asked to conduct intelligence collection assignments against an even dozen of those companies where the security managers had previously asked us about steps to defeat our efforts,” Nolan writes. “In every one of those cases, we’ve accepted the assignment, because that is what we do, but with the caveat to the client that we are uncertain about our level of success because we know that the company under consideration has a security leader who is apparently involved in information protection. But now we don’t bother with that caveat anymore. Why? Because when we try to penetrate the designated target company, we don’t find it any more difficult to conduct collection operations there than in any other companies…perhaps we’re just a heckuva lot better than we think we are.” It would take an analyst versed in the work of Lacan to decode the depth of schizophrenia involved in this spy-vs-spy scenario.

In his pitch to corporate executives Nolan delicately avoids mentioning the most important factor in corporate snitching: the fact that so many employees are mistreated at their jobs that they can’t wait to sabotage their bosses.

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. 

Highest U.S. Marginal Tax Rate is Too Damn Low

BY SYLVIA ALLEGRETTO

 APRIL 14, 2023
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With Tax Day just around the corner, it is a good time to put post-WWII top marginal tax rate into context. Many find it hard to believe that the top rate was 91% during the Eisenhower years. No, that didn’t mean that high earners paid a 91% tax on all of their income.

Take the 2022 tax brackets for single filers. The lowest rate is 10% and applies to taxable income (after deductions) up to $10,275. The first $10,275 is taxed at the same rate for everyone regardless of whether total taxable income is $10,000 or $750,000. The same logic applies to each successive tax bracket.

The highest marginal rate this year is 37%, which only applies to each dollar above $539,900 for single filers. So, for taxable income of $539,901, the top tax rate would be assessed on $1.00 for a tax of 37 cents. Income that is millions above the $539,900 threshold is all taxed at the same 37%. Given rate increases for much lower levels of income, this seems unfair.

For the last three decades, the mainstream policy debate around the top rates has centered around the difference of, at most, a few percentage points. As the figure shows, the Bush tax cuts (2001-03) lowered the highest rate from 39.6% to 35%. Obama set them back to 39.6% (2013) before Trump moved them to 37% (2018).^[1] President Biden’s income tax plan continues the trend over the last three decades, as it would return the top rate to the Obama-era 39.6% for single filers earning over $450,000. The best research from Saez and Zucman pegs the optimal federal marginal income tax rate around 60% – though this depends on enforcement and avoidance factors, this optimal rate is leaps and bounds away from the modern-day seesaw of a couple percentage points.

While no single tax change can solve the issue of fairness and revenue for things both needed and nice, progressive tax changes across corporate, capital gains (20% top tax rate!), personal income (federal and state^[2]), estates, and wealth together can change the landscape of the country. Current tax structures starve investments in our aging infrastructureand other public goods like healthcare, education, childcare, and veteran care. Inequality continues to soar and the richest Americans and corporations are not paying their fair share. Bold progressive policies across all taxes are necessary to invest in people, their communities, and to reflect our values at a level commensurate with our vast national resources and wealth.

Notes.

^[1] Clinton did not change the top rate but removed the cap on Medicare taxes. Obama also added a 0.9% surcharge to high income earners. Together, they add 3.8 percentage-points to the top marginal rate.

^[2] State taxes vary widely with many implementing cuts, nine states have no personal income tax. Other states have more progressive policies. For instance, California has a top state rate of 13.3% with an additional 1% on income above a million dollars